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judaism
Speak Out Now Against Netanyahu's Final Solution for Gaza
It is morally and ethically irresponsible for mainstream Jewish and Christian groups not to condemn Netanyahu's continuation of the war as genocide.
Aug 12, 2025
The world is asking why major Jewish organizations, and congregations around the country, aren't speaking out about genocide. It can't be hidden. The failure to condemn Israel's crimes against humanity is a glaring breakdown of moral responsibility, casting a dark shadow and is a growing source of antisemitism.
I have overheard neighbors, who are not political, talking about what Israel is doing in Gaza. An acquaintance during a conversation suddenly asked, "Are you Jewish?" A Christian friend asked me, "Why aren't the Rabbis speaking out?"
Gaza has more children missing limbs per capita than any other place in the world.
Contemplate this fact as children are preciously guided through Jewish education culminating in the Bat Mitzvah for girls and Bar Mitzvah for boys. As new adults they will grow up with a history different from their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. Rather than being survivors of the Holocaust, they will inherent a legacy of Jewish people committing mass murder, starving millions, and violently carrying out ethnic cleansing. Growing up, secular or religious, they are living at a time when Israeli politicians, religious fanatics, and a majority of ordinary citizens have supported the commission of genocide as exigent to the survival of the Jewish State.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote in The New York Times:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
In the future, who among today's Jewish children will be able to say my parents protested, my rabbi spoke out, they supported resolutions to end America's backing of genocide at this crucial moment when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's murderous regime is planning a final solution for Gaza.
Reports by leading Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel concluded that their country is committing genocide.
B'Tselem produced a detailed study titled, "Our Genocide":
An examination of Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Whitewashed words and bleached language cannot erase the genocide being committed by Israel and underwritten by the United States. Nor can it hide behind a smokescreen of deflections such as "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "Hamas started the war."
It is morally and ethically irresponsible for mainstream Jewish and Christian groups not to condemn Netanyahu's continuation of the war as genocide. A group of some 600 retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of intelligence agencies, have written to U.S. President Donald Trump asking him to force Israel to immediately end the war in Gaza.
"It is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel," the officials said.
Yet the bombing and starvation continue. And the record numbers of child amputees in Gaza will continue to climb. Making matters worse Netanyahu has announced plans for a new full-scale invasion of Gaza designed to inflict even more pain and suffering for no logical reasons other than the acceleration of ethnic cleansing and furthering the genocide.
No matter how many lies are told, genocide cannot be koshered in the name of support for Israel. Synagogues and their national organizations must loudly condemn crimes against humanity and demand the United States halt arms shipments to Israel.
Even Eyal Zamir the current Israel Defense Forces chief of staff thinks the plan to continue and expand the war is disastrous. But he is powerless as long as Trump supports Netanyahu and Congress continues to approve the sale of 1,000-pound bombs and other weapons used in the commission of war crimes.
In order to reset the record, major Jewish and other religious organizations should take out full-page ads in newspapers around the country calling for an immediate cease-fire to enable the United Nations and others to bring in unlimited food, water, medical supplies, and other essentials. In return, the surviving hostages and thousands of Palestinians unlawfully held in Israeli prisons must be released without delay.
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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Jewish Scholars, Israeli Academics Denounce Trump Weaponization of Antisemitism
"By singling out Jews as a homogeneous group to be protected at the expense of other marginalized groups and minorities, the administration is in fact fostering anti-Jewish sentiments," wrote a group of Israeli academics.
Apr 18, 2025
Jewish voices ranging from academics in Israel to a coalition of mainstream American Jewish organizations this week spoke out against the Trump administration, arguing that the White House's has used the fight against antisemitism as a pretext for targeting higher education. Some said the tactic actually makes Jews less safe.
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the purported aim of rooting out antisemitism at higher education institutions, and vowed to target foreign-born students who have engaged in "pro-jihadist" protests.
Since then, Trump immigration officials have detained multiple people involved in pro-Palestine campus demonstrations on Columbia University's campus, including Palestinian green-card holders Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.
The administration's antisemitism task force in February announced investigations into several of universities, and has also targeted funding at multiple universities.
In response to these developments, hundreds of Israeli academics—both in and outside of Israel—signed an open letter published Thursday, alleging the Trump administration is cynically using the goal of combating antisemitism to crack down on Columbia University and other U.S. universities.
"By singling out Jews as a homogeneous group to be protected at the expense of other marginalized groups and minorities, the administration is in fact fostering anti-Jewish sentiments," according to the letter, which also notes the signatories are alarmed by the persecution of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
"We condemn the weaponization of Jewish students' safety as grounds to silence, harass, suspend, punish, or deport pro-Palestinian members of U.S. academia," the letter states.
Other figures in U.S. academia also aired similar concerns this week.
University of Southern California journalism professor Sandy Tolan, who has written a book about Israel-Palestine, argued in commentary published Wednesday by Rolling Stone that the administration's "witch hunt" in higher education settings "has little to do with actual antisemitism."
"If it did, Trump would have fired Elon Musk immediately after his straight-armed salute on Inauguration Day—a gesture widely interpreted as a 'Sieg Heil,'" he wrote of Trump's billionaire adviser.
Similarly, the Jewish president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, told NPR on Thursday that Trump's scrutiny on universities "is like using antisemitism as a cloak to do other things, to get universities to express loyalty to the president." Earlier in April, Roth wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times making this same point.
According to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, over 30 prominent Jewish scholars of antisemitism, Holocaust studies, and Jewish history on Thursday challenged the Trump administration's embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry. The group said this definition has been used as a tool for the administration to attack higher education.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 10 organizations representing three out of four of the major Jewish denominations in American Jewry issued a statement on Tuesday taking issue with what they called a "false choice" between combating antisemitism and protecting democracy and the rule of law.
"In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding. Universities have an obligation to protect Jewish students, and the federal government has an important role to play in that effort; however, sweeping draconian funding cuts will weaken the free academic inquiry that strengthens democracy and society, rather than productively counter antisemitism on campus," wrote the coalition, which was brought together by the progressive Jewish Council for Public Affairs, but also included conservative groups like the Rabbinical Assembly.
"There should be no doubt that antisemitism is rising," the coalition wrote, but "these actions do not make Jews—or any community—safer. Rather, they only make us less safe."
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